I was in the Staff Office early that morning, as I was Duty Officer. I hadn’t been in the door but a few minutes when the phone rang. The voice was all too familiar, barking orders as soon as I said my name into the phone. Capt Wes Jordan, Chief of Staff at COMNAVSURFLANT began ordering me to pull all the MEFEX (Middle East Force Exercise) training records from the previous summer.
He told me the news of the STARK being attacked, in his to the point manner, and told me to get the files down to his office right away. This order, while not from my current Commodore, was easily interpreted as one of priority.

Capt Jordan, no longer the DESRON 32 Commodore, retained a tremendous amount of info on just about everything, including the record keeping he had required when we had sailed on our work up exercises for a Med deployment. The USS STARK (FFG-31) had tagged along with the battle group to get her training in, as there wasn’t a dedicated fleet exercise for those few ships then deploying to the Middle East force AOR. That being the case, we had her daily exercise completion reports filed along with those of the rest of the ships on the FLTEX.

I opened one of the classified safes and began retrieving the thick folders of exercise messages. As I Was involved in this process, the Commodore, Capt Joe Lopez, and the Chief Staff Officer, CDR Dewey Collier arrived. I recall turning around from the tall stand up safe and telling them about the phone call. Capt Lopez’s expression was one that indicated he wasn’t too happy with the chain of command being jumped over (about three steps to be exact) and then he told me to get the files and get them down to SURFLANT.

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